Dance with Me

Alexei Ratmansky, the most sought-after man in ballet.

When Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre, walks into a room, what you notice first is his carriage, the high, open chest. Once a ballet dancer, always a ballet dancer. Otherwise, he’s a regular-looking forty-two-year-old man: medium height, nice face, receding hairline. He has a small gold earring in his left ear, and I have never seen him in any color but black: a polo shirt, maybe, and trousers with a bit of stretch. In the studio, he wears ballet slippers. This is so that he can demonstrate to the dancers the steps and the poses that he wants them to do. He demonstrates constantly. He rarely sits down.

Before joining A.B.T., in 2009, Ratmansky was the artistic director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet for five years. During that time, and before and after, he also had a frenetic freelance career. He has mounted ballets not just at the Bolshoi but at the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov), the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the national ballets of Finland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania, and San Francisco Ballet (the first American company to invite him). No one who can afford to call him hasn’t, it seems.

The most important Western troupe to ask for his services was New York City Ballet. There, in 2007, he created his witty and grave “Russian Seasons,” which has become his calling card. (Since its première, it has been acquired by four other companies.) It is lovably Russian, enacting basic dramas of life—a fit of rage, a lost love, a marriage, a death, the hope of Heaven—in twelve scenes. The piece is unashamedly descended from “Les Noces,” the stylized peasant-wedding ballet that Bronislava Nijinska created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, almost a century ago. Even more clearly, its score, by the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, and incorporating Russian folk songs, is a child of the famous oratorio that Stravinsky wrote for “Les Noces.”

“Russian Seasons” is also a product of Ratmansky’s admiration for certain dancers at New York City Ballet. The fit of rage was choreographed for Sofiane Sylve, a muscly French dancer who, as we didn’t know until then, had soul as well as strength. The dream of Heaven was for Jenifer Ringer—“very woman, and good actress,” he says—whom he felt he could depend on for exultation without sanctimony.

“Russian Seasons,” then, is full of human feeling. It is almost a set of stories, with subjects dictated by the lyrics: a girl complaining that she hasn’t received a letter from her boyfriend, who is in the Army, and maybe her family is going to marry her off to an old man, and so on. But Ratmansky’s focus, he says, was the score: “just to get this group of dancers that I liked and make them live inside this music. And have a true time there inside this music. Nothing superficial.”

Also, whatever acting the dancers produced was contained within classical ballet steps. This is a crucial fact about Ratmansky: his fidelity to the academic vocabulary—glissade-assemblé and the rest. Many other modern ballet choreographers, seeing the classroom steps as old-fashioned, elide them or junk them or turn them into a postmodern “style” thing. Ratmansky loves them, however. His phrases are thick with steps. Those maneuvers, he says, were developed, over many years, in the laboratories of studio and stage, to show ballet dancers at their very best. You’d be a fool to throw them away.

To some people, Ratmansky’s faithfulness to the old steps might mark him as a conservative. Likewise his attachment to old stories—love, death, the grand design. Yet, by combining these two conservatisms, Ratmansky has produced a renewed modernism. Huge feeling, packed into a tight form; narrative, crammed into abstraction—these were the achievements of Nijinska and her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, and of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the makers of modernist ballet. Today, we hear a lot of talk about “Where is the next Balanchine?” There won’t be a next Balanchine. What we might get, however, is someone with a similar cast of mind.

Soon after Ratmansky made “Russian Seasons,” he let his contract with the Bolshoi expire, and everyone assumed that he would sign on as the resident choreographer at City Ballet. Negotiations were under way. Then, in a dramatic reversal, he signed with City Ballet’s rival, A.B.T., so that, in addition to the hoo-ha over his ballets, he became a subject of scandal, and a fought-over prize. The story was especially interesting with regard to A.B.T. Many years had passed since there was a good young choreographer regularly making ballets there. Long after Balanchine died, his N.Y.C.B. still had a reputation for being forward-thinking. A.B.T. was considered the opposite: the house of “Swan Lake” and blue-haired ladies. So for Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of Ballet Theatre, to bag Ratmansky was both a coup and a surprise.

At the end of last year, Ratmansky created a “Nutcracker” for A.B.T. It has some kinks, but he will have time to work on it. The company has reserved the Brooklyn Academy of Music for it for the next five Decembers. In May, A.B.T. premièred Ratmansky’s “Dumbarton,” set to Stravinsky. Two weeks ago, the company’s version of his full-evening “The Bright Stream” had its first New York showing. In July, when the Mariinsky comes to the Met, it will bring two evening-length ballets by him. Last month, his three-year contract with A.B.T. was extended by ten years. For the moment—and such phenomena sometimes do last for only a moment, or a few years—he is the most looked-to choreographer in Western ballet.

But you wouldn’t realize that from talking to him. He is unaffected and modest. He freely names the companies where, as a dancer, he auditioned and wasn’t hired. (I don’t know another dancer who would say such a thing to a journalist.) When he can afford to, he makes excuses for people. Discussing turnout—the hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation of the leg that is now considered essential in ballet, to enable the dancer to move in all directions—he says without hesitation that the Bolshoi scores low on this. Then he adds that, if the Bolshoi dancers had perfect turnout, they would not be able to do the high jumps that they are famous for. “When did you ever see an animal who was a jumper and had turnout?” he asks.

At times, his modesty looks almost like naïveté. Ratmansky did not attend the gala at the beginning of his first season at A.B.T. He was probably the one person that the gala-goers—that is, the people who give money to the company—wanted most to see, but he and his wife, Tatiana, went home after the show. Tatiana explained to Roslyn Sulcas, of the Times, “We wanted to get back to Vasily”—their thirteen-year-old son—“and Alexei had to work the next day.”

Ratmansky’s parents were living in St. Petersburg when he was born, but they moved to Kiev when he was two. The father was an aeronautics engineer who in his youth had been a gymnastics champion. He put Alexei in a gymnastics class. The mother was a psychiatrist who loved the arts. She took the boy to concerts and bought him records of classical music. So he had two essential ingredients of ballet: athleticism and music. He added a third. He couldn’t stop moving; he hopped around all the time. A friend of his mother’s suggested that he go to ballet class, to work off some steam. Soon afterward, the family was on vacation in Moscow, and was told that the Bolshoi Ballet’s school was holding auditions. Almost on a whim, the parents took Alexei there, and he got in.

He was ten, young to be left with strangers, but soon he was glad to be in ballet school. He and his classmates had great respect for their teacher, the redoubtable Pyotr Pestov. “The discipline was like wartime,” Ratmansky recalls. “He would leave us holding the leg ninety degrees, and stop the music and stand there and tell stories, and the one who lets the leg down is dismissed.” But Pestov’s students felt that his strictness was an index of his seriousness. “His attention was the transitional step, the musicality,” Ratmansky says. “He didn’t teach us any tricks, like Bolshoi tricks—high jumps, double splits, that stuff. He said, ‘You’ll learn interpretation in the theatre.’ As a result, his students are not so well at doing those steps today. But instead we got the understanding of the phrase, the logic of the phrase, and strong backs and soundless landings and good pliés—many wonderful features of the old Russian school.”

Bolshoi students practically had to kill themselves to see the Bolshoi Ballet—seats were reserved for more important people. But Ratmansky sneaked in. His idol was Maya Plisetskaya. At first, what struck him most about her was her curtain calls: “I remember the wild screams of the audience. They would throw the flowers from the highest balcony, and it would go for half an hour. Non-stop flowers.” Eventually, he saw what people were screaming about: “Her musicality was absolutely unique. When she danced, you see the orchestra, not just the melody or the rhythm.”

By this time, music was centrally important to him, and he got good musical training at the school. He took piano lessons for four years. (Today, when preparing to make a ballet, he studies the score, at the piano, if the counts are difficult. Otherwise, he goes by his ear.) He also had classes in music history and musical theatre every term. “Sometimes, those lessons, we were just sitting and listening to music,” he says. “That’s when I started to visualize steps in my head. And I thought, This is something I can do every time I listen to music.” He began to compose ballets. The first was to Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” He made it with his dorm-mates, and they invited some teachers and friends. But he says that the school gave him no encouragement: “The Bolshoi doesn’t try to develop choreographers.”

At the time of the Revolution, Russia had an immensely exciting modernist movement, but it was soon quelled by Stalin, in favor of Socialist Realism. In ballet, that meant corrected versions of the classics (“Swan Lake” was given a happy ending) or new ballets that leaned heavily toward agitprop: virtuous stonecutters, and so on. When the subject was not related to Communist teachings, the style was: it was sentimental and bombastic. It was also anti-classical. This trend was epitomized by Yuri Grigorovich, who directed the Bolshoi for three decades, from 1964 to 1995. Grigorovich deëmphasized canonical ballet steps in favor of what seemed to him more exciting maneuvers: stage-covering leaps, wraparound partnering, overhead lifts.

This is what Ratmansky knew of ballet in his youth. Then came videotapes from the West, showing other styles. Some, such as Balanchine’s, were more classical: they used the academic vocabulary, although they played with it—twisted it, tilted it, had ideas about it. Those were the tapes that Ratmansky’s tradition-minded teacher, Pestov, exclaimed over as he played them for his students. “Look how pure it is!” Pestov said, as they watched Balanchine’s “Apollo.”

This confused Pestov’s pupils, Ratmansky recalls:

It was so easy for us, the Russian ballet students. Everything was clear. We had the Bolshoi Ballet, which was big heroic ballets, story ballets, and that’s how ballet should be. And then . . . we got the videos, we got some companies coming to Moscow showing completely different kind of stuff. I was not sure anymore that the ballet that I knew, the principles of the ballet that were so hammered in my head during the school years, that they are right. That it’s a complete system. I saw the different side of ballet.

When Ratmansky graduated, in 1986, he was not invited to join the Bolshoi—a painful disappointment. He went to the Ukrainian National Ballet, in Kiev, where his family lived. There he met Tatiana Kilivniuk, his future wife. She was neither a strong nor a fast dancer, he says, but she had beautiful legs: “Gorgeous, pointed feet, and knees that go in, and very nice shape of the muscles.” He believes that by choreographing on her—to show the fabulous legs and at the same time to make her work on her weaknesses (or to hide them)—he became a craftsman. Ratmansky and Kilivniuk got married in 1994, and joined the stampede of former Soviet dancers to the West. They ended up at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, where Ratmansky performed in the kind of work he had seen on the videos.

In 1997, he and Tatiana moved to the Royal Danish Ballet, in Copenhagen. The Danish company is unique in that it owns a large repertory of ballets by the great nineteenth-century choreographer August Bournonville. Bournonville had quaint subjects: brave young fellows, naughty trolls, pretty little fairies. This should have seemed foolish to Ratmansky, coming from the beefy Soviet tradition. On the contrary, he was fascinated: first, by these ballets’ ability to tell a detailed story; second, by Bournonville’s use of character dance, hard-footed, folk-style dancing; and, above all, by the constant employment of the classical vocabulary, the glissade-assemblé, as the language of dance.

Though Ratmansky became a principal dancer at R.D.B., the company let him take choreographic assignments elsewhere, and his name got around. Finally, he was asked by his old company the Bolshoi to make a full-evening ballet of his choice. While he was in Moscow, he received a message that Anatoly Iksanov, the troupe’s general director, wanted to see him. He went, and Iksanov invited him to become the artistic director of the Bolshoi. Ratmansky asked, Don’t you want to see the new ballet first? No, Iksanov replied. Ratmansky, thirty-five years old, took the job. He started in 2004.

If one accepts the idea that Russia needed to be exposed to Western choreographers, then Ratmansky was perfect for the post, because his experience was half Russian and half Western. At that point, he had worked in the West for more than a decade. But many Russian dancers see no need to catch up with European or American ballet. What, catch-up? Ballet is the sacred property of the Russian people, and the way they do it is the way it should be done. The West, with its inert torsos and silly, noodling ballets, might want to catch up with them.

Some of the Bolshoi’s senior dancers complained that Ratmansky was not an important enough person to direct their organization. To them, he later told Anna Kisselgoff, of the Times, he was just “someone from Denmark, and where is that?” In response to this reception, combined with what he saw as the Bolshoi’s serious faults, he began, at times, to talk tough. In 2006—in the middle of his tenure, when he still needed the good will of the company—he told Kisselgoff, “One third of them are really, really good dancers. Another third, they are nice on stage—good-looking—we can use them. The other third I would actually be happy to fire. But that’s not possible. They have life contracts.” They were unmusical, he says, and their feet were messy. Above all, the dancing looked to him lazy, complacent, false. The primary culprit, he felt, was the repertory—Grigorovich, mainly. Ratmansky kept some Grigorovich ballets in the repertory; he felt that he had to let the dancers wear their old slippers now and then. But he stated flatly that Grigorovich was a bad influence. In the rainbow of human feeling, he said, Grigorovich was only one color.

To broaden the spectrum, Ratmansky commissioned pieces by Russians (they were not a big success), and he added a number of Western ballets. Some of these were ostensibly quite alien to the Bolshoi—for instance, Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” in which, to a driving score by Philip Glass, half the women, in pointe shoes, do ballet, and the other half, in sneakers, do a sort of cross between sock hop and tap dance. It is unlikely that any Bolshoi dancer had ever before walked onstage in sneakers. Ratmansky insists that he chose “In the Upper Room” because he thought that its hellbentness would mesh well with Bolshoi virtues—the company’s extroversion and athleticism. The veteran Moscow dance critic Vadim Gayevsky feels that the piece pepped up the company, especially the younger dancers.

But the most imaginative aspect of Ratmansky’s new repertory policy was his decision to bring back Soviet ballets, or what could be salvaged of them, from the nineteen-thirties. As he saw it, the Bolshoi’s distinctive style solidified in the thirties, and the company had its great day in the fifties, before Grigorovich. (That was when the Bolshoi first came West and everyone went crazy over Plisetskaya and Galina Ulanova.) So he decided to remount a number of the old ballets. In almost all cases, the original choreography was lost. When there was surviving material, he used it. Otherwise, these works were newly choreographed, mostly by him.

The first of them, and perhaps still the most successful, was “The Bright Stream.” The original “Bright Stream,” to a score by Shostakovich, had its première in 1935, midway through Stalin’s collectivization program, and it was part of a bizarre genre born of those years: the “tractor ballet,” glorifying Soviet agriculture. But the ballet was a flat-out comedy, with love trysts and dogs on bicycles. Stalin was not pleased. Pravda printed an editorial, entitled “Ballet Fraud,” saying that life on a collective farm was “a very important, great theme that must not be handled light-mindedly.” “The Bright Stream” was shelved; Shostakovich never wrote another ballet score; Fyodor Lopokov, the choreographer, lost his job; and Adrian Piotrovsky, the librettist, was sent to the Gulag, where he died. Ratmansky may have chosen this piece in order to memorialize his martyred predecessors. Such an explanation would be most welcome. Collectivization was a catastrophe—more than seven million people died of hunger. Ratmansky’s revival of “The Bright Stream” caused some people to scratch their heads. Was this ballet supposed to be postmodern? Was it ironic?

Ratmansky says that he didn’t mean it that way at all: “Glasnost, perestroika, was nineteen-eighties, so it’s more than twenty years. We don’t need to be angry anymore. Soviet art—we see it in the distance as a complete style, which has many virtues, good things about it. For me, it’s the last big style in Russian ballet, actually. I think it’s the same if you look at Stalinist architecture in Moscow. It’s very impressive. It’s the landmarks of Moscow.” Whatever we may think about Socialist Realism, some good artists were raised under its banner. It was what they knew, in their youth, as art: that epic scale, that bitter strength. Ratmansky’s friend Mikhail Baryshnikov recalls that once, when he and Ratmansky were talking about Russian art, he speculated, “What if there had been no Revolution, and we could have gone forward from the modernism of the twenties?” Ratmansky did not like the idea. “I learn from this Soviet ballet,” he said. “It’s who I am. All my foundation is there.” At this moment, when Ratmansky is so admired, people may not want to hear about Soviet loyalties on his part, but everyone has a mother.

Baryshnikov has made another point about Ratmansky’s retrievals of his native repertory: “He loves Russian music, and for him everything comes from music. When he talks to me about ballet, it’s always about music. Or Tchaikovsky, or Prokofiev, or Asafiev. ‘I live in that country for so long,’ he tells me. ‘I do what’s first. When I will live ten, fifteen years in the United States, I will do American music.’ ” Baryshnikov thinks that the reason Ratmansky created “The Bright Stream” is that its score was by Shostakovich, and he couldn’t bear to see a major Shostakovich work retired. (He has set seven ballets to that composer.) He likes other Russian composers, too. His recent use of Stravinsky in “Dumbarton”—and his setting of “Russian Seasons” to Desyatnikov’s Stravinsky-inspired score (a composition structured, furthermore, by the Russian Orthodox liturgy for the cycle of the year)—was not an accident. The score was not chosen for a ballet that Ratmansky was contemplating. He heard the score, and that impelled him to make a ballet. It is probably not just love but also exile that bonds Ratmansky to Russian music. He speaks of his country without nostalgia. “I think I have lost the feeling of home,” he says. Yet he told Dale Brauner, of the Web site danceviewtimes, that the subject of “Russian Seasons” was “a question of whether I’m Russian at all.” His nationality seems to be on his mind.

The old ballets, the Shostakovich and Stravinsky and Stravinsky-based scores, were part of Ratmansky’s effort to show the Bolshoi dancers that they, too, had had a noble artistic history—deep, daring, intelligent—in the early twentieth century. And most of the Bolshoi principals wanted no part of this. Grigorovich was the style they were used to. It was also, by that time, what they could manage. Ratmansky says that a lot of people in the company weren’t sure they could do the pieces he introduced, and they didn’t want to look bad. Dancers pulled out of the new ballets.

Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a star of the company, said to me that the basic problem with Ratmansky was his inexperience. “At first, we only smiled when he attempted to make certain remarks to the soloists”—the principal dancers—“after the classical ballets he has never danced himself.” Furthermore, he violated emploi, the sorting of dancers into types: noble dancers (the prince, the swan queen), demi-soloists, character dancers, etc. “Alexei began to substitute all the principals by ordinary artists.”

Tsiskaridze is probably not representative of the whole upper tier of the Bolshoi; he may just be the most outspoken. But he delineates what seem to have been the principals’ basic grievances. Because Ratmansky was not a highly accomplished classical dancer (neither, of course, were Marius Petipa or Lev Ivanov, the creators of the Russian imperial style; or Grigorovich, the founder of the modern Russian style), he had no right to correct classical dancers. And, when they brushed aside his instructions, he, in revenge, replaced them. Or, as Ratmansky would tell it: in order to cast the company’s new ballets with people who actually wanted to do them, and would try to learn the necessary style, he had to tap young dancers, people who, in Tsiskaridze’s view, should have been waiting their turn. Under Ratmansky, a pair of sensational débutants, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, came up, both starting with him at age seventeen. (Osipova, now twenty-five, had a triumph as a guest artist at A.B.T. last summer and is back at the company now, presumably at her old boss’s behest.) A number of extremely talented soloists also came forward. The thrill of the Bolshoi’s most recent New York season—led by Ratmansky, in 2005—was not the principals but the second tier.

The complaints, the dirty looks in the hallway, multiplied. Russian dancers, especially the women, are assigned to coaches, with whom they work for years and develop very close relationships. Under Ratmansky, the coaches began to protest that their protégés were being debased by the new ballets—indeed, that they were being endangered physically. Keith Roberts, the ballet master assigned by Twyla Tharp to set “In the Upper Room” on the Bolshoi, remembers watching Osipova weep as her coach stood over her, urging her to pull out of that ballet: her feet would be damaged, not to speak of her reputation. Osipova wept some more. Then she danced “In the Upper Room” and gave an electric performance. She won a prize for it.

The abuse let up a bit after the summer of 2007, when the company had a clamorously successful season in London. Still, the stars were not the Old Guard but Osipova and Vasiliev. Furthermore, Ratmansky cast a guest artist, the shot-from-guns Carlos Acosta, as the lead in Grigorovich’s “Spartacus.” “That caused a lot of talkings,” Ratmansky says. No doubt! “Spartacus” is the Bolshoi’s most sacred ballet. To see it danced by an outsider—especially an Afro-Cuban—was surely a great surprise.

Finally, a coup de grâce, the reviewers in London remarked again and again on how much better the company looked since Ratmansky had taken over. The revelation of the season, Jane Perlez wrote in the London Times, was not any one dancer or ballet but “the overall look, speed, and spirit of this revitalized company under Alexei Ratmansky.”

He likes to think that he was philosophical about these troubles. There are two hundred and twenty dancers in the Bolshoi, he says, and “all of them have their own opinions.” His wife, though, remembers phone calls in the night, threats. Eventually, Ratmansky, too, was worn down. He had galvanized the young dancers and woken up some of the older ones. He had introduced twenty-four new ballets into the Bolshoi repertory. The directorate wanted to renew his contract, but he was through. He once again turned his face to the West. He began talking to New York City Ballet, then to A.B.T., about a staff position.

His switch from N.Y.C.B. to A.B.T. is a story that we probably won’t know the particulars of until somebody dies. Ratmansky has explained it with charity to all. He wanted to go on freelancing, he said. Indeed, he had contracts extending into 2010. Peter Martins, the artistic director of City Ballet, preferred that his resident choreographer stay closer to home. But Kevin McKenzie, at A.B.T., was willing to give Ratmansky a longer leash. (Ratmansky’s contract requires that he work at A.B.T. for only twenty weeks a year.) There may have been another factor, beside the schedule. In the middle of his negotiations with Martins, Ratmansky got a phone call from McKenzie, asking him to make a ballet for A.B.T. At that time, Ratmansky was not only enjoying his new popularity; he was also trying to insure that he would be able to support his family in the West. Here was another gig—in New York!—and he happily said yes. It seems likely that for City Ballet Ratmansky’s accepting an occasional assignment in Helsinki or Toronto was one thing, but for him to make a new ballet for the company across the plaza was another.

“I wanted to go with City Ballet,” Ratmansky said to me. He liked those dancers very much—the most musically sensitive dancers he had ever encountered, he says. But he quickly cheered up. The A.B.T. dancers, he pointed out recently, have better port de bras, the styling of the upper body—head, neck, shoulders, arms—something that for a Russian is essential. They are also better actors.

The kind of acting he can get out of A.B.T. was made clear by “On the Dnieper” (2009), the first piece he made for the company. This is probably the most emphatically narrative ballet that he has created in the West—the story of a soldier returning to his village and finding that he no longer loves his fiancée. He loves the town sweetheart instead. Ratmansky cast much of the ballet against type. Veronika Part, a beauty, who, in the past, has sometimes shown a vague, blurry outline, was the discarded fiancée. It was hard to imagine Part being discarded, and amazing to see the spins and spasms she produced in her grief. Meanwhile, Paloma Herrera, often a straight-on virtuoso, was the dainty little vixen who stole the boyfriend—a balanced portrayal. (You didn’t blame her.) Marcelo Gomes, the hero, is normally a glamorous type, a movie star of ballet. Here, he was a tender young man, bewildered by his emotions. Most moving of all was David Hallberg, the man Herrera dumped for Gomes. This suave, tall dancer, the very picture of ballet in its purest form—he would later be the first-cast Prince in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker”—became a peasant boy in ill-fitting clothes, red-faced, shaking, utterly undone, when he understood, at last, that his girl was leaving him for someone else.

Why do so many companies want Ratmansky’s services? In terms of the field, the most important thing he has done is to revitalize the story ballet, make it respectable. Forward-thinking Russian critics were astonished by this. “We thought story ballet was dead,” Vadim Gayevsky said to me. “Ratmansky proved that it was alive.” You could argue that at the Bolshoi Ratmansky favored narrative in order to please his audience. (Most Russians, he says, don’t take a ballet seriously unless it lasts for two and a half hours and has a plot.) But once he moved West he went on making narrative, or sort of narrative, ballets: “Russian Seasons,” “On the Dnieper.” If he had wanted to impress New York’s supposedly sophisticated, story-scorning audience, he might have laid aside the Russian sorrows.

But, as he told Baryshnikov, narrative was in his blood, or, at least, in his professional history. Furthermore, he says that he doesn’t see a big difference between narrative and abstract ballet. He points out that the most valued sections of what are thought of as narrative ballets—for example, the Rose Adagio and the Vision Scene in “The Sleeping Beauty”—are in fact abstract dance. Likewise, a lot of what is called abstract dance—for instance, Balanchine’s “Serenade,” which Ratmansky acquired for the Bolshoi—seems to have a story. (Young woman falls in love, dies.) For him, both narrative and non-narrative dance spring from the same source, the music. The next crucial ingredient is the dancers: their natures, their personal styles. He describes some of the women he loved at City Ballet: Wendy Whelan (“underwater quality, very flowing”), Sara Mearns (“all the movement comes from the middle of the spine, like a Russian”). For these people, specifically, he creates the steps. This is not an unusual method, but he seems to practice it more intently than other choreographers. As a result, character emerges, and so does plot.

Ratmansky’s narrative leanings, however much they are based in his training, are part of a trend. Since the nineteen-fifties, when Balanchine and Merce Cunningham became the gold standard in the United States, it has been considered axiomatic that the best dance is abstract dance. As Balanchine famously said to one of his dancers, “Don’t show me your soul—I want to see your foot.” But apart from those two remarkable artists there weren’t a lot of choreographers who could interest American audiences in plotless dances. Company directors, sensing that the public was actually more fond of stories than was said to be the rule, brought in narrative choreographers, often from outside the United States. These people created, on the whole, silly and portentous work that, even if the audience often liked it, the reviewers made fun of. So, as of about twenty to thirty years ago, American ballet was at an impasse. The correct, abstract work was too dry; the incorrect, narrative work was too wet.

Then came a shift. Some highly respected choreographers—Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris—started making narrative pieces. Furthermore, dance writers began arguing that Balanchine’s and Cunningham’s work wasn’t so abstract after all but full of feeling, and that a lot of the pure-dance talk was just to get people to look at steps again, instead of mooning all the time over the swan queen. Ratmansky, probably unknowingly, is a member of this new club. Of his bizarre and wonderful “Namouna,” made for N.Y.C.B. last year, he remembers that he said to himself, “I want to do a story ballet which is abstract.” He got his wish. In the piece, a woman (Jenifer Ringer) does a long, crazy solo while smoking a cigarette. The hero, in a sailor suit, looks on, amazed. Two little girls skitter through again and again. Several of the women wear tutus with wired skirts that look like satellite dishes. Everything is mind-prodding and strange, like a dream, the more so because the ballet is set to a conventional, tuneful score by the late-nineteenth-century composer Édouard Lalo. “Some said it was like what opium provided,” Ratmansky says, with restrained pride.

If we are lucky, his work will affect the field. Looking at “Namouna” and “On the Dnieper” and “Russian Seasons,” younger choreographers, too, may hazard work that is deep and bold. And, as the top dancers grow and shine in such ballets, younger dancers will size themselves accordingly. In the past three decades, all the great classical choreographers of the late twentieth century have died. Certain people have feared that ballet, too, will die—or is dead. Not yet. ♦

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. She is the author of, most recently, “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.”